Chapter 3
Owen heard the story. When I finished, he was quiet for a moment. "You need to find out if it's true," he said. "You can't sit on this."
"I don't know how to reach her."
"She's a Montgomery," Owen said. "That's not a family you can't find. The question is whether you want to find them."
I sat with that question for two days. The answer, when it arrived, was not complicated. If those three girls were mine — if there was any possibility, any fraction of possibility — then sitting in my apartment looking at a tattoo on my forearm was not a thing I was permitted to do. The not-knowing was only acceptable if the knowing was genuinely unavailable. It was not genuinely unavailable. It was one phone call to a family that was in every business directory in the city.
I called an attorney first. Her name was Patricia Hale, and she had handled Rachel's estate and the medical debt afterward with the care of someone who understood that legal matters are always also personal matters, and when I told her what I was considering she listened without interruption and then said: before you contact anyone, let me make an inquiry. Give me forty-eight hours.
Patricia came back in thirty-six.
What she had found was this: Camila Montgomery, thirty-six, eldest daughter of the Montgomery family, had given birth to triplets seven years and four months ago. The father listed on the birth certificates was a man named Gerard Ashworth, whom Camila had been briefly engaged to in the period following the birth and who had been confirmed through the family's own records as not the biological father after a private paternity dispute two years later. The engagement had ended. Gerard Ashworth had no legal relationship to the girls. Camila had been raising them alone, with family support, since.
"The birth certificates were amended two years ago," Patricia said. "The father line is currently blank."
I looked at the wall.
"Patricia," I said. "What does blank mean legally?"
"It means no one has established paternity," she said. "It means the question is still open."
She made the contact through formal channels, the kind that could not be ignored or misread as anything other than what they were: a legal inquiry from an attorney representing a man who had reasonable cause to believe he might be the biological father of three minor children. The response from the Montgomery family's legal team arrived within twenty-four hours, which told me they had been expecting something like this, or something related to this, at some point.
The response was not a refusal.
It was a request for a meeting.
The meeting took place in a conference room in a Midtown office building on a Tuesday morning, and I sat on one side of a long table with Patricia beside me, and across from us sat two attorneys and, between them, Camila Montgomery herself.
Eight years had not changed her in the ways I would have expected. She was composed in the way of someone who has had years to prepare for a moment and has decided composure is the correct response to it. She was wearing a gray blazer over a dark dress and her hair was shorter than I remembered and her hands were folded on the table in the specific way of someone managing what her hands are doing.
She looked at me for a long moment before anyone spoke.
Then she said: "I was going to tell you."
"When?" I asked.
"When I knew who you were," she said. "I didn't know your last name. I didn't have a way to find you. When the girls were born I hired someone to look. The name Daniel wasn't enough. Seattle in October eight years ago wasn't enough." She paused. "When the paternity question with Gerard came up two years ago, I hired someone better. I found a Daniel Marsh working construction management in New York. I had a photograph confirmed." She looked at the table. "I was building toward telling you. I didn't know how."
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"Your daughters walked up to a stranger in Central Park," I said. "Because they recognized a tattoo."
Something moved across her face. "I know," she said. "I've been telling them about the compass for two years. I told them it was from someone important who I hadn't found yet." She exhaled. "I didn't anticipate Central Park."
